Are there any similarities between the men’s rights movement and feminism?
Article here. Excerpt:
'The feminist playwright Penelope Skinner has written about women having affairs (The Village Bike), women turning 50 (Linda) and becoming invisible and millennial loneliness (Eigengrau). But she ventures into brand new territory with Angry Alan, which for the first time has a man at the centre of her one-man-play.
She worked with her partner, Donald Sage Mackay to create the role. He plays Roger, a man who feels angry after losing his job and getting divorced and discovers catharsis in following an evangelist for the Men’s Rights Movement called Angry Alan.
Angry Alan is based, in part, on the real-life men’s activist Angry Harry, who blogged and vlogged about our ‘gynocentric society’ until his death in 2016 and the face of the Men’s Rights movement, Paul Elam, the founder of the A Voice for Men website who makes long videos and essays about why marriage and divorce are unfair to men.
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There are moments in the play when the parallels between the Men’s Rights Movement and feminism are drawn out. Skinner demonstrates that they are both striving for equality, even if they come at it from very different perspectives. Sometimes you feel sympathy for Roger’s point of view, especially when he talks about how he wants to see more of his son.
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“I feel the story of this guy Roger is an important story and I’m not sure men are telling it,” says Skinner, who became interested in the fringe movement in 2016, around the time of the Presidential election.
The 40-year-old playwright, who made her name with the controversial plays Fucked and The Village Bike about female sexuality says she wanted to cover the rise of the men’s rights movement because after the US election, she and her partner, who is American, “had all these feelings” and “there was this immediate sense of wanting to respond.”'
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